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Ransomware incident on The Pirate Bay

Recently on the popular The Pirate Bay torrent website there was malvertising (malicious ads), which led users to the Magnitude exploit kit pages infected with Cerber ransomware.

What is ransomware? It is a type of malware that restricts access to the infected computer system in some way, and demands that the user pay a ransom to the malware operators to remove the restriction. Usually it looks like scary notification telling you that you breached something and need to pay, otherwise data will be removed/all your secret photos will be published and so on. Or it displays a window with a questionable content on the screen of the computer (sometimes in browser), which promise to stay with you forever unless you pay.

This happened to visitors of The Pirate Bay. They were redirected to infected pages, after that downloaded virus displayed the notification: “Your documents, photos, databases and other important files have been encrypted”. And of course, they were immediately and “carefully” asked to purchase decryptor to save the data.

Malwarebytes (guys engaged with web security) has documented over 400 unique malvertising incidents that specifically have come from the AdsTerra ad network since the beginning of April. Each campaign has leveraged the Magnitude exploit kit, and each has dropped the Cerber ransomware as its ultimate payload.

So as you see, there many online dangers and you need to protect yourself – install anti-viruses and ad blockers. And we can recommend one useful tool for that ! :)